Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
alien abduction paradigm is 'Who's conning who?' Is the client
deceiving the therapist, or vice versa? I disagree. For one thing,
there are many other interesting questions about claims of alien
abduction. For another, those two alternatives aren't mutually
exclusive.
Something about the alien abduction cases tugged at my memory
for years. Finally, I remembered. It was a 1954 book I had read in
college, The Fifty-Minute Hour. The author, a psychoanalyst named
Robert Lindner, had been called by the Los Alamos National
Laboratory to treat a brilliant young nuclear physicist whose delusional
system was beginning to interfere with his secret government
research. The physicist (given the pseudonym Kirk Allen) had, it
turned out, another life besides making nuclear weapons: in the far
future, he confided, he piloted (or will pilot - the tenses get a little
addled) interstellar spacecraft. He enjoyed rousing, swashbuckling
adventures on planets of other stars. He was 'lord' of many worlds.
Perhaps they called him Captain Kirk. Not only could he 'remember'
this other life; he could also enter into it whenever he chose. By
thinking in the right way, by wishing, he could transport himself
across the light years and the centuries.
In some way I could not comprehend, by merely desiring it to
be so, I had crossed the immensities of space, broken out of
time, and merged with - literally became - that distant and
future self . . . Don't ask me to explain. I can't, although
God knows I've tried.
Lindner found him intelligent, sensitive, pleasant, polite and
perfectly able to deal with everyday human affairs. But, in
reflecting on the excitement of his life among the stars, Allen had
found himself a little bored with his life on Earth, even if it did
involve building weapons of mass destruction. When admonished
by his laboratory supervisors for distraction and dreaminess, he
apologized; he would try, he assured them, to spend more time on
this planet. That's when they contacted Lindner.
Allen had written 12,000 pages on his experiences in the future,
and dozens of technical treatises on the geography, politics, architecture,
astronomy, geology, life forms, genealogy and ecology of the
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